One Senator’s War Against Climate Change

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Every week, Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, heads to the floor of the
Senate, sets up an easel and some poster board, and delivers a
speech. He works hard on these speeches. They’re deeply
researched and beautifully crafted. He delivers them with
passion -- to a mostly empty room. His colleagues figure they
have better things to do than listen. But 100 years from now,
when our grandchildren look back and try to understand what we
were doing while the world burned, these speeches may well be
some of the most famed rhetoric of the age.

The speeches are on climate change. They range in tone from
morally outraged to deeply wonky. One focused on how best to
structure a carbon fee. “We should start by setting aside about
$140 billion -- or 12 percent of the total -- to help lower-income households,” Whitehouse said.

Another concerned Hurricane Sandy. “We do know that a
warming planet increases both the severity and the likelihood of
these storms; that it, to use one analogy, loads the dice for
extreme weather,” Whitehouse said. A third focused on how
climate change hurts our public works. “We can no longer use
historical climate patterns to plan our infrastructure
projects,” he warned. My personal favorite featured
Whitehouse’s response to a Senate colleague who had averred,
“God won’t let us ruin our planet.” Whitehouse’s reply was
unsparing: “That is seeking magical deliverance from our
troubles,” he said, “not divine guidance through our
troubles.”

Extreme Shift

Today, Whitehouse delivered the 50th of these speeches. It
came at a depressing time for climate activists. A new report
from the United Nations Environment Program shows the world is
on track to blow past the 2 degrees Celsius increase in global
temperature that climatologists have set as a sustainable limit
on warming, and rush right on to 4 degrees.

The difference may not seem like much. Humans naturally
tend to comprehend temperature in terms of personal experience
rather than global climate models. But while 4 degrees might be
the difference between shorts weather and sweater weather for an
individual, on a planetary scale it’s roughly the difference
between the globe’s current climate and the Ice Age.

A recent World Bank report envisioned a future shaped by 4
degrees of warming. The results were -- no pun intended --
chilling.

“Recent extreme heat waves such as in Russia in 2010 are
likely to become the new normal summer,” the authors wrote.
Ocean acidification could increase by 150 percent, wiping out
coral reefs and the ecosystems that depend on them. Sea levels
would rise by 0.5 meter (1.6 feet) to 1 meter, leading to floods
of biblical proportions. Tsunamis and hurricanes -- such as the
one that killed at least 2,275 in the Philippines last weekend -
- will become more powerful and lethal. Climate change will
become the central threat to biodiversity: Unable to mobilize
technology, or pick up and move to new climes, animals and
plants will succumb to a warmer world.

It’s not even clear that humans will be able to mobilize
enough technology to adapt to that much warming. “Given that
uncertainty remains about the full nature and scale of impacts,
there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4 degrees C
world is possible,” the authors warned.

Holding warming below 2 degrees is still possible. It’s
just not likely. To achieve it, global carbon emissions would
need to fall about 14 percent by 2020. That’s technically
achievable, but in a world where few countries seem committed to
painful emissions cuts, and where China, India and other
developing nations continue to power growth with fossil fuels,
something truly disruptive would be required to change the
warming trend significantly.

Action Plan

Still, Whitehouse remains optimistic. “There is a path
before us,” he said in a phone interview. “The first part has
already been done, and that is the president’s climate action
plan for new and existing power plants. When faced with the cost
of compliance I think those polluters might well decide that an
economywide carbon fee makes more sense. The second is people
are starting to fight over this issue in elections in a very big
way. I think you’ll see deniers pay a heavier electoral price.”

To Whitehouse, this isn’t just an isolated policy issue.
It’s a test of American democracy -- one that might reverberate
long into the future. ’’What if the world takes notice of what
is already happening all around them, and takes notice of how we
blew it at dealing with carbon pollution, and, as a result,
turns away from our great American experiment, because of this
conspicuous and consequential failure of American democratic
governance and leadership?’’ he asked in a speech in July.

In those same remarks, Whitehouse recalled “an iconic
recruiting poster for World War I” that featured a man sitting
in an armchair surrounded by his children. “Daddy, what did you
do in the Great War?” The man’s expression makes the answer
clear: Not enough.

Whitehouse went on to imagine the same question being posed
to him and his colleagues. “What if we have to be asked by our
children and grandchildren when they are studying this
disgraceful episode in their history classes: ‘Mommy, what did
you do in the Great Climate Fraud; Grandpa, what did you do in
the Great Climate Fraud?’”

With little hope of legislation moving anytime soon, and
few paying attention to his weekly floor speeches, I asked
Whitehouse whether his addresses were really aimed at his own
descendants -- at leaving a record of how he fought against
denialists and cowards who refused to protect the one and only
planet we have.

“I very much want my grandchildren to know that I fought
the good fight,” he replied. “But much more than that, I want
to turn this around.”